Why It Matters

A new Congressional Research Service report on the Local and Regional Project Assistance Program (LRPA) lands at a pivotal moment: the federal infrastructure funding pipeline that has sustained local transportation projects for over a decade is narrowing fast, and the Trump Administration has quietly rewritten the rules for who benefits.

The central tension is straightforward. Congress built this program to give local communities direct access to federal transportation dollars, bypassing state departments of transportation that might have different priorities. But the program's discretionary nature means each administration can reshape it through grant criteria alone, no legislation required.

The Big Picture

The LRPA program — currently branded as the BUILD grant program — began in 2009 as a $1.5 billion economic stimulus measure tucked into the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Over 17 fiscal years, it has distributed roughly $20 billion in nominal dollars across more than 1,000 capital grants for roads, bridges, transit systems, rail corridors, and ports.

The program's name has changed with each administration, a pattern that reflects more than branding. The Obama Administration called it TIGER, the first Trump Administration renamed it BUILD, and the Biden Administration rebranded it RAISE, adding sustainability and equity criteria. In January 2025, the second Trump administration renamed it BUILD again and amended the funding criteria to comply with two executive orders, removing references to climate change, electrification, disadvantaged communities, disadvantaged business enterprises, equity considerations in workforce and land development, environmental justice impacts, and racial equity.

Those changes were made to align with Executive Order 14005 and Executive Order 14173. Post-award program requirements were also amended to strip guidelines on climate change, environmental justice, racial equity, and labor standards.

The FY2026 Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) went further. It added criteria for autonomous systems designed to improve safety outcomes while removing options for reducing air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, vehicle miles traveled, lower-carbon construction materials, and brownfield redevelopment. The administration also reduced the solicitation from two application rounds to one.

Funding levels tell their own story. The Consolidated Appropriations Act 2026 provided just $145 million in annual funding. The House Appropriations Committee had proposed zero funding for LRPA in FY2024, FY2025, and FY2026, citing the availability of multi-year advance appropriations from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). The Senate consistently proposed higher amounts. The IIJA had provided $1.5 billion per year for FY2022 through FY2026, but that pipeline closes at the end of FY2026.

Oversight findings compound the concern. A 2023 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report made five recommendations to improve the Department of Transportation's (DOT) grant evaluation process, covering benefit-cost analysis support, oversight of evaluation teams, documentation of decisions, identification of selection factors, and rationale for final selections. As of January 2026, DOT had fully addressed only one of the five.

Political Stakes

For the Administration

The BUILD program is a useful vehicle. Infrastructure spending is broadly popular, and road projects have historically dominated awards, composing 54 percent of all awarded projects since FY2009. The administration's revised criteria favor that modal preference while shedding the equity and climate frameworks associated with the Biden era. The addition of autonomous systems as a safety criterion also signals alignment with the administration's broader technology priorities.

The risk for the administration is on the oversight front. DOT's incomplete response to GAO recommendations leaves the program exposed to congressional scrutiny, particularly as surface transportation reauthorization approaches. If lawmakers conclude that the selection process lacks transparency or consistency, they may move to constrain DOT's discretion through statute, limiting the administration's ability to direct grants according to its own priorities.

For Republicans

The rural funding mandate is a political asset. Since FY2019, Congress has required that 50 percent of grant funding go to rural areas, defined as communities with populations below 200,000. That mandate has held: from FY2020 through FY2023, awards were split exactly 50-50 between rural and urban areas. Rural members have a direct stake in preserving that requirement and the program's funding levels.

For Democrats

The statutory primary selection criteria, codified in federal law, still include improving environmental sustainability. The administration has narrowed that criterion in practice through NOFO documents without changing the underlying statute, creating a gap between what the law says and how the program operates. Democrats may use the reauthorization debate to push that criterion back into operational prominence or to codify specific sub-criteria that the administration stripped out.

For the Public

The stakes are concrete. The program's $25 million individual grant cap means it is not built for megaprojects. The CRS report notes that Amtrak's Hudson Tunnel Project is estimated to cost over $16 billion, a figure that dwarfs the entire annual LRPA budget. What the program does well is reach smaller communities with targeted investments. In FY2025, the smallest grant was $160,000 for a roadway improvement plan in rural Rogers County, Oklahoma. The largest were $25 million capital grants distributed across urban and rural areas. The gap between those figures illustrates the program's reach and its limits.

The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 also includes a provision requiring that no less than 5 percent of annual appropriations go to historically disadvantaged communities or areas of persistent poverty, a higher threshold than the 1 percent written into statute.

The Bottom Line

Congress is heading into a surface transportation reauthorization debate, centered on H.R. 8870, with an LRPA program that is simultaneously shrinking in annual funding, operating under criteria rewritten by executive order, and carrying unresolved oversight findings.

The program's discretionary structure gives the executive branch substantial latitude to reshape priorities without legislation, and the current administration has used that latitude aggressively. The statutory framework remains intact, but what gets funded, what gets measured, and what gets rewarded in the evaluation process has shifted materially since January 2025.

What replaces IIJA, if anything, will be determined in reauthorization negotiations where the program's purpose, scale, and criteria are all on the table. How Congress resolves the tension between executive discretion and statutory accountability in that debate will shape which communities receive project assistance funding for the next several years.

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